Dell EMC, through its close relationship with VMware, today announces extensive advancements across its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and hybrid cloud platforms portfolio to help simplify and speed customers’ IT transformations. Today’s announcements span Dell EMC’s broad portfolio of turnkey HCI solutions, turnkey hybrid cloud platforms and flexible Ready Systems, each designed to help modernize IT for VMware environments and data centers at any scale.

“Dell EMC leads the converged infrastructure market by listening to customers and offering the best and broadest portfolio of solutions to help support their IT transformations at any stage of readiness,” said Chad Sakac, president, Dell EMC Converged Platforms and Solutions Division. “For customers who have standardized on VMware, the success of VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC demonstrate that customers are looking for the data center easy button. With today’s advancements, Dell EMC is offering even greater value for customers while making it easier for them to benefit from transformative IT models that fundamentally simplify and accelerate IT service delivery. This translates into real business results faster while reducing costs and risk.”

Dell EMC Turnkey Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Advancements

Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, the only HCI appliances powered by VMware vSAN and jointly engineered with VMware, will become available in September 2017 with the latest version software, VxRail 4.5. This new release offers simple automation and lifecycle management for the latest VMware technologies – vSphere 6.5 update 1 and vSAN 6.6 update 1. New enterprise benefits include:

Greater scalability – With new batch multi-node scaling, the automated VxRail Appliance deployment experience, optimized for a single appliance, can be applied to multi-node expansions.

More security options –Advanced security includes vSAN Encryption, the industry’s first native HCI security solution with data-at-rest encryption built into vSAN 6.6.

Dell EMC VxRack SDDC, the easy and fast way to stand up a VMware-based, rack scale software defined data center environment, is now powered by the latest VMware technologies, including VMware Cloud Foundation, making it up to 80% more efficient at scale, providing more resources for applications with a single management cluster for the entire system. Other benefits include:

Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud continues to extend its capabilities through comprehensive updates to both Dell EMC and VMware software, which offers:

Increased scale and availability – Multi-site support now extends to VxRail-based deployments, enabling organizations to start small and grow their hybrid cloud environment to up to four sites with virtual machine-level disaster recovery and management through a single portal.

More public cloud options – Adding Microsoft Azure as an end-point offers customers greater flexibility to choose among public clouds.

Greater simplicity and automation – Support for accelerated installation of VxRack SDDC-based deployments and new automated upgrades to VxRail-based deployments reduces time for installation and upgrades.

Highly available deployments on Dell EMC VxRail – New high availability options with multi-site, multi-foundation and multi-availability zone configurations support global-scale deployments.

The Workbench – A set of tools designed to help developers and operators new to Pivotal Cloud Foundry launches with the Access Testing Tool and new Deployment Management Tool. This allows developers to quickly diagnose connectivity issues to legacy environments and IT operators can maintain control by setting rules and policies while developers can push applications securely to multiple locations via one click.

Dell EMC Ready Solutions Advancements

Dell EMC also develops a broad series of Ready Solutions that offer a simple and reliable way to acquire tested and validated solutions aligned to application and use case workloads that reduce risk and lower total cost of ownership.

Complementing Dell EMC’s turnkey hybrid cloud platforms, the company announces a close collaboration with VMware and VMware Validated Designs to offer VMware Ready Systems from Dell EMC for customers wanting to deploy hybrid clouds on HCI. Ready Systems provide a simple, standard approach to building hybrid clouds while enabling customers to take on more of the deployment, configuration and lifecycle management responsibilities.

The new VMware Ready Systems from Dell EMC will be pre-tested and highly repeatable cloud offerings that combine VMware cloud software with Dell EMC HCI options of VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC Systems for a Dell Technologies-aligned stack. Designed for customers and deployments of any size, they offer quick, easy and low-risk deployments with a lower capital investment than with the turnkey lifecycle and single support model of EHC and NHC.

Likewise, for customers who want to build and manage the lifecycle of their own HCI stacks, Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are now available featuring the 14th generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes deliver the capital economic benefits of HCI for organizations that prefer to take on more operational aspects otherwise addressed with turnkey HCI solutions. The entire Dell EMC hyper-converged portfolio will transition to 14th generation PowerEdge servers by the end of 2017.

Industry Context

For the first quarter of 2017, IDC research shows that HCI is by far the fastest growing converged systems segment, accounting for 25% of the overall converged systems market revenue with a growth rate of 64.7% year over year. IDC predicts the quickly growing HCI solutions market will surpass $7.6 billion by 2021.

With HCI offerings, such as VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems, increasingly being used for core data center applications, they have become solid foundations for turnkey, hybrid cloud platforms such as Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud. As organizations continue to benefit from a combination of on-premises and public cloud resources, a recent IDC CloudView Survey finds that the vast majority – 79.7% – of large organizations (with 1,000 or more employees) report they already have a hybrid cloud strategy in place.

Availability

Dell EMC VxRail Appliances 4.5 software will be available for new orders beginning in September 2017. Existing customers will be able to upgrade to VxRail 4.5 shortly thereafter in Q4.

Dell EMC VxRack SDDC, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, is planned for global availability by end of September 2017.

Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud on VxRack SDDC is available via an early access program with general availability planned for 2018. Native Hybrid Cloud high availability on VxRail and Workbench tools are available today.

VMware Ready Systems from Dell EMC have planned global availability in the second half of 2017.

Customer quotes

Don Shackley, CIO, Steinberg Diagnostics Medical Imaging (SDMI)
“SDMI’s data center continues to experience phenomenal storage and compute growth needs, addressed perfectly with easily scalable hyper-converged appliances. By moving to Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, we’ve been able to deliver the best healthcare services from on-demand, high-performance applications while meeting our desires to transform our IT operations and support. We have quickly seen significantly improved application performance and have simplified everything by consolidating our data center monitoring and management to a single pane of glass.”

Shlomo Bistry, Vice President, Production and Infrastructure, Bank Leumi
“To remain competitive in our industry, we need to ensure that we have a world class IT environment to help us be as efficient as possible while also speeding our time to market with new IT services. With Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, used first to quickly stand-up our own private cloud, we are best able to achieve these goals and at the speed of a start-up company to better and more quickly support our customers.”

Analyst quote

Eric Sheppard, Research Director, IDC
“HCI is the fastest-growing part of the converged infrastructure market, proven to support mission-critical capabilities for the core data center and as a foundation for the on-premises part of hybrid cloud. Organizations are increasingly realizing that the benefits of HCI can help drive profound changes in their data center and are turning to trusted infrastructure suppliers like Dell EMC when buying HCI solutions. Dell EMC's broad spectrum of HCI entry points with turnkey solutions, including VxRail Appliances, VxRack Systems and XC Series, and flexible Ready Nodes, each with tight integration of hardware and software components, are helping organizations realize the full potential of HCI’s simplicity.”